1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of job spidering and more particularly to a system, method and apparatus for finding job postings on a wide area network and importing the job postings into a common searchable format.
2. Description of the Related Art
Finding a job has progressed from word-of-mouth to newspaper want-ads to modern online services. The likes of Hotjobs.com and CareerBuilder.com have web sites containing millions of job postings. Furthermore, profession-specific sites such as careers.findlaw.com, jtpos.com have many more job postings specific to a particular industry or profession such as law. Even more geographically restricted sites such as orlandosentinel.com, Miami.com and latimes.com have job postings restricted to a certain geographic area (Orlando or Miami, Fla. and Los Angeles, Calif.). Add to that a plethora of corporate web sites such as att.com/hr (AT&T), dell.jobs.com (Dell) and 3m.com/careers (3M).
Each web site has its own database of job postings, its own search engine to help the jobseeker find the job they are looking for, its own format for displaying results and its own method/format for importing a résumé from the jobseeker. Furthermore, many of these web sites require the jobseeker have an account along with a username and password. In general, tens-of-thousands of new jobs are added, expired or modified every week; requiring the jobseeker to periodically log onto all potential job posting web site (remembering their logon credentials) and searching for their desired job using the tools specific to that web site.
What is needed is a system that will spider through this plethora of web sites, locate the job postings, extract pertinent information from each posting and import the information into a consolidated, searchable database whereby the jobseeker searches one database to find all applicable job postings then, when they find one of interest, they are able to apply to that job through the original web site (e.g., dell.jobs.com).